Kaia Public Chain is poised for launch, stablecoin plan attracts follow

Recently, the Kaia public chain has become the focus of the crypto market due to the strong increase in its token price. Since its official launch in August 2024, Kaia has been continuously working on technical performance and ecological development. Recently, its actions in the stablecoin and payment sectors have sparked enthusiastic discussions among industry investors. Senior officials from the foundation publicly stated, "The summer of Kaia's stablecoin is coming soon," implying that its fiat-pegged token plan has entered the implementation stage.

With the new government coming to power, the support for the issuance of stablecoins pegged to the national currency has become South Korea's latest policy direction. The Kaia team seized the opportunity to announce partnerships with several super apps to launch a Korean won stablecoin. As soon as this news was released, related concept stock prices surged, and the Kaia token also rose, increasing from nearly $0.10 to a peak of $0.17, reflecting the market's strong expectations for the prospects of local stablecoin projects in South Korea.

Borrowing the Favor of Policy, the Kaia Stablecoin Project Launches

After the new South Korean government proposed a policy to support the local currency stablecoin in 2025, Kaia quickly responded and announced plans to launch a Korean won stablecoin. This news has sparked a strong market reaction, with related concept stocks rising sharply, indicating that the market is full of expectations for the Korean won stablecoin.

The Korean won stablecoin project proposed by Kaia is being promoted by multiple parties and is currently still in the planning stage, with no specific issuance timetable yet. With its digital wallet infrastructure and QR code payment system, the relevant companies are widely seen as potential beneficiaries of the local stablecoin.

Currently, the South Korean government is formulating the "Basic Law on Digital Assets" and actively exploring a regulatory framework that allows private institutions to issue stablecoins. The draft of this bill aims to relax the rules for cryptocurrency exchanges, allowing non-bank institutions and payment service providers to issue stablecoins. Under this framework, the approval authority for stablecoin issuers will be under the Financial Services Commission. The bill also significantly lowers the regulatory threshold, reducing the capital requirement for issuers from the previously proposed 5 billion KRW to 500 million KRW.

However, according to the South Korean Constitution, the right to issue legal currency belongs to the central bank, and private institutions face legal obstacles in issuing fiat-backed tokens. The Bank of Korea has expressed concerns about these proposals, believing that indiscriminately issuing stablecoins denominated in Korean won could lead to "currency runs," thereby affecting the competitiveness of the won.

In terms of policy orientation, the head of the Digital Asset Committee of the ruling party in South Korea stated that it will support private issuance and plans to clarify the legal provisions for stablecoin legalization in the "Basic Law." The group that Kaia relies on itself has large-scale payment and financial infrastructure, which provides a convenient channel for the practical use of stablecoins in the future.

Despite the enthusiastic market response, the prospects of the Kaia stablecoin project remain uncertain. On one hand, issues related to monetary sovereignty and anti-money laundering compliance still need to be addressed; on the other hand, the issuance and redemption mechanisms of the stablecoin also require validation. In addition, there are several potential competitors targeting this market. Recently, several large banks in South Korea publicly announced plans to jointly issue stablecoins.

Therefore, although Kaia's stablecoin program started amidst policy opportunities, sparking much imagination, whether it can obtain regulatory approval and be smoothly implemented still faces many uncertainties.

Social giants join forces, with 250 million potential users

Kaia public chain is a large blockchain network mainly aimed at the Asian region, formed by the merger of two well-known blockchain projects, officially launched in August 2024. Its goal is to reach hundreds of millions of Asian users by seamlessly integrating Web3 services with mainstream social applications.

These two social applications are the most popular instant messaging platforms in South Korea and Japan, respectively. The South Korean platform has nearly 95% penetration in its home country, with about 50 million monthly active users; the Japanese platform covers 70% of Japan's population and dominates markets in Thailand and Taiwan. With a distribution capability of over 250 million users from the two major social platforms, Kaia, positioned as a high-performance, easy-to-use public blockchain, has long been regarded as one of the "potential stocks" to promote the popularization of crypto applications. This year, the Kaia Foundation has raised external funds from multiple investment and financing institutions to support ecological incubation and market promotion.

Before the two merged into Kaia, both original projects had impressive developments. One project officially launched in 2019 and was an important representative of the South Korean blockchain network, with its user base achieving a 1,100% growth by 2023, reaching 873,000; the other project went live in 2022 and provided an NFT platform within its ecosystem, accumulating over 5.6 million users and completing about 560,000 NFT transactions. After the merger of the two chains, Kaia inherited the DeFi, gaming, and other ecosystems of the former and the NFT, payment, and other application scenarios of the latter, to achieve technological and user complementarity. The official vision emphasizes that Kaia will "put Web3 at the fingertips of hundreds of millions of users in Asia" and build an efficient platform to support the development of large-scale decentralized applications.

As an Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 public chain, Kaia technically inherits and optimizes the original consensus framework. Its consensus algorithm is based on an optimized Istanbul BFT, achieving rapid final confirmation of blocks and supporting multi-node participation. The official documentation states that the Kaia network can handle up to 4000 transactions per second, with a block generation time of just 1 second and instant transaction finality. Unlike conventional PoW/PoS, Kaia adopts BFT consensus aimed at enterprise and service scenarios, ensuring that once a block is produced, it is finalized, with no traditional risk of block rollback. Kaia network nodes are divided into consensus nodes, proxy nodes, and endpoint nodes, with consensus nodes managed by core operators responsible for block generation and verification. The network design ensures that more than 50 nodes can participate in consensus, balancing throughput and decentralization.

In terms of technical features, Kaia supports account abstraction and fee delegation, significantly simplifying the user experience; at the same time, it integrates identity and payment channels from two major social platforms, allowing ordinary users to use on-chain services without additional registration. Kaia also maintains equivalence compatibility with EVM chains like Ethereum and plans to support CosmWasm smart contracts; its industry-leading cross-chain bridge integration capability provides developers with flexible multi-chain interoperability. It is worth mentioning that the Kaia mainnet is actually a hard fork of the original mainnet, and all states are automatically inherited to the Kaia chain after the merger.

Expanding from the Gaming Sector to Financial Services

When Kaia was first launched, user and capital indicators were still in the initial stage. By mid-2025, Kaia ranked approximately in the top fifty globally in the DeFi TVL rankings, reflecting the scale of its ecosystem at the early stage. In terms of on-chain activity, Kaia's official sources disclosed that over 40 million users have accessed the Mini DApp portal. The number of wallets and transaction volume grew rapidly in the early stages after launch, but the overall level still falls far short of established mainstream public chains like Ethereum, Solana, and BNB.

Ecologically, Kaia has merged the original application ecosystem, forming a comprehensive ecosystem covering multiple fields such as DeFi, NFTs, GameFi, and Real World Assets (RWA). According to official statistics, there are already over 420 decentralized applications and game services that have been or are planned to be launched on the Kaia network after the merger.

In addition, alongside the launch of the Kaia mainnet, a builder support program called Kaia Wave has been introduced. This program aims to provide multi-faceted support to promising Dapps, enabling them to reach consumer users in both Web2 and Web3, and gain additional advantages from sources such as social platforms, Web3 marketing alliances, creators, and Kaia's vertical services. According to official documents, the Kaia Wave program will offer a total value of $10 million in KAIA tokens, specifically for user acquisition and rewards.

In the DeFi sector, Kaia has launched multiple decentralized exchanges and staking and lending projects, and the platform also supports stablecoin, cross-chain bridges, and other infrastructure; in terms of NFTs, Kaia inherits the user base of the original platform, and its GameFi ecosystem benefits from the user groups and partner resources of two major social platforms, with some game developers starting to launch mobile games, NFT items, and other content on Kaia.

Following other well-known projects, the Dapp Portal is one of the main drivers of the Kaia ecosystem's development in terms of Mini DApp distribution and user engagement. The Dapp Portal is built on the Kaia chain and is accessible to users through the official accounts of social applications, allowing access to games, social interactions, trading, and other Mini DApps directly within the chat interface without the need to download or install any new applications. In January of this year, Kaia jointly launched the first batch of 32 Mini DApps, enabling users to create wallets, play games, claim rewards, and trade NFTs with a single click, without the need for additional client installation.

In its official strategy, Kaia is gradually expanding from the gaming sector to financial services and general applications: by early 2025, it has already launched a USD stablecoin yield product on one end, with subsequent plans including the introduction of borrowing, perpetual contracts, payment, and asset tokenization DeFi protocols, as well as achieving seamless exchange functionality between the Korean won and stablecoins.

In May of this year, a well-known stablecoin issuer officially deployed its USD stablecoin on Kaia, providing stablecoin payment and cross-border transfer services to nearly 200 million users, marking Kaia's further expansion in the international stablecoin ecosystem. Overall, Kaia is accelerating the construction of a platform-level ecosystem, jointly promoting the use case of "message as an entry point, on-chain as payment" with industry partners.